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Simulated hair and fur is quickly becoming an amazing feature to add increased visual fidelity to games these days. It’s been a standard feature in offline visual effects for years and has continued to become more impressive. Films such as Mighty Joe Young, King Kong, Avatar, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes have all used hair and fur technologies on entirely computer-generated characters to sell a more complete immersion into the story being told. A less obvious use of this...

Depth precision is a pain in the ass that every graphics programmer has to struggle with sooner or later. Many articles and papers have been written on the topic, and a variety of different depth buffer formats and setups are found across different games, engines, and devices.
Because of the way it interacts with perspective projection, GPU hardware depth mapping is a little recondite and studying the equations may not make things immediately obvious. To get an intuition for how it works, it's...

NVIDIA HairWorks makes it easy to bring hair and fur to life—in real-time! It builds on the prior release, which focused on fur authoring, rendering, and simulation. With HairWorks version 1.1, NVIDIA has added support for authoring, rendering, and simulation of long-hair assets. HairWorks can be used for high-quality assets similar to the example below from Tarkan Sarim, with 500k hair. It can easily scale down to lower quality assets for use in a variety of games. Since HairWorks is...

Doom 3 BFG Edition is a re-mastered version of Doom 3 for the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC that was
released in 2012. NVIDIA worked with id Software and Bethesda to bring it to the SHIELD
Tablet and SHIELD Android TV. This article highlights some of thing things that went right as well as wrong.
What Went Right?
OpenGL
The Doom 3 BFG Edition renderer was using OpenGL on the PC, and since the Tegra K1 and X1 chips
support full OpenGL, porting that over was trivial. There are no changes to the...

I recently delivered a presentation on Hybrid Ray Traced Shadows (HRTS) at GDC 2015, as part of the “Advanced Visual Effects with DirectX 11 & 12” tutorial. If you weren’t fortunate enough to attend GDC, then you can catch up with what I was talking about right here!
As the name suggests, the technique combines ray tracing with conventional shadow mapping, to deliver extremely high quality contact-hardening style shadows. You end up with the best of both worlds, with...